Reading in review 2013

'Tis the time of year to turn again to the review of books. I know this isn't especially interesting to anyone but me, just like the last post, but I'll do it again out of a desire for keeping track, for trying to measure some accomplishment or use of time that wasn't necessarily useful or productive, but not wasted either, or some accumulation of knowledge or wisdom, or for exercising my weakening memory.

 Books read: 53
Of these, YA books numbered: 23, at least
Of the 53, at least 14 were written before 1950. (Weil was published in 1951.)
16 or so were written in about the last 5 years.
37 were fiction.
The Hobbit, Skylark, the Ramona books, and Homer Price were read alouds. Most of the other YA books were newer ones that we read for our little mother-daughter book club in Guam: a brief source of joy for me and her, I like to think (although I'm sure her happiness came from sharing snack time with friends.)

The harder job is to pick a favorite book of the year.  The top runners:
Anna Karenina, A Passage to India, and Grapes of Wrath
  - What can I say? The classics remain classic for a reason. All three of these had fascinating characters, lyrical writing, haunting imagery, and timeless themes.  All three are very different.  Plenty of reasons to love these books that I don't have time, the eloquence, or the need to go into.
Least favorites are easier to choose. None of these were horrible books; they just were forgettable to me:
The Marriage Plot - bloated
Ship of Fools - boring
Language of Flowers - thin

Very little spiritual reading done this past year. Enjoyed reading Thomas Merton and want to read more. Didn't enjoy the Weil as much as I thought I would, but perhaps my situation was a distraction.  I just didn't have much appetite for mysticism at the moment.

Best non-fiction? Enjoyed my uncle's self-published memoir Leaf of Mine for personal reasons. Keep coming back to A Geography of Bliss in conversation with other people. One reason for reading non-fiction for me is to figure out what people are talking about and to have something to talk about in awkward social situations.  And a second reason is to stay somewhat informed/inspired about reading/teaching reading just in case.  So I have to say I really enjoyed the Bradbury book Zen in the Art of Writing both as a book about reading and about writing, and the same goes for the collection of Welty essays The Eye of the Story. Both of these were Christmas vacation reads. I have to admit I skimmed some of the Welty essays, so technically I didn't finish the book, but the essays I did read were so meaty, I didn't have the energy to read the whole thing, which includes author studies, essays on fiction, reviews, and some more personal prose. Her essays on Jane Austen and Willa Cather were especially good, as are the essays on fiction. For example, here is a paragraph from "Looking at the Short Story":
               "And we have observed that the finest story writers seem to be in one sense obstructionists. As if they held back their own best interests - or what would be in another writer their best interests. It's a strange thing. And what is stranger is that if we look for the source of the deepest pleasure we receive from a writer, how often do we not find that is seems to be connected with this very obstruction.
    . . . We are speaking of beauty. And beauty is not a blatant or promiscuous or obvious quality; indeed, it is associated with reticence, with stubbornness, of a number of kinds. It arises somehow from a desire not to comply with what may be expected, but to act inevitably, as long as some human truth is in sight, whatever that inevitability may call for. Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form to aftereffect."

Or from the essay "On Place":
"Through the story's translation and ordering of life, the unconvincing raw material becomes the very heart's family. Life is strange. Stories hardly make it more so; with all they are able to tell and surmise, they make it more believable, more inevitably so."

And later (this pertains to a discussion we had recently with my brother- and sister-in-law):
 "The open mind and the receptive heart -- which are at last and with fortune's smile the informed mind and the experienced heart -- are to be gained anywhere, any time, without necessarily moving an inch from any present address. There must surely be as many ways of seeing place as there are pairs of eyes to see it. The impact happens in so many different ways." (The conversation was about whether travel makes you a better person. More on that...)

And every transient person, military or otherwise, must sometimes agree with this:
 "There may come to be new places in our lives that are second spiritual homes -- closer to us in some ways, perhaps, than our original homes. But the home tie is the blood tie. And had it meant nothing to us, any other place thereafter would have meant less, and we would carry no compass inside ourselves to find home ever, anywhere at all. We would not even guess what we had missed."

It's a big book of essays; I could quote more. Instead, I'll look forward to 2014.  What are my reading goals? Number one is to continue the reading with the kids, but I'd like to get in another Dickens and Shakespeare - could those be kids' lit choices?  Also I want to reread some more of what we have on the shelves: Cather and Faulkner, Austen's Mansfield Park?  I walked past Henry James yesterday and thought maybe I should reread one of his. And I still have more Forster books I haven't read.  But the Navy wives book club pick is A Child Called It. Sure to be interesting even if not intellectually challenging.

Meanwhile, finding reading time remains challenging. My list gets shorter every year. And with no travel this Christmas break, I haven't even finished a book in 2014. Time to finish up something!